Saturday Oct 11th, Report #2

Woke up at 6am and could not get back to sleep, still a little jet lagged, Iguess. Not a very nice looking morning, foggy and cold, however it turnedinto a lovely day. Had a nice omelet for breakfast and then got ready to goto the Carpathian Mountains to distribute food and clothing. By the time wehad all the boxes loaded, there was hardly room for us!! We filled up withdiesel; the price is way more than the gas at 6.56R a liter. It cost us 400+R at 4.33 per Canadian dollar, that's expensive. The trip starts out on thenew good roads but once you hit the foothills the roads are horrendous. Theheavy rains had played havoc with what road surface there was and then thewater was running over the road still in many places. It is 137 K to thevillage we visit and take 3 hours to reach. We picked a man up who was waiting for a bus, I think, as Ruslan recognizedhim as the husband of the family with 12 children the last time I visited 5years ago, but now has 14 children. There's was the house that had burnedpart of the roof off, and when we first visited with Seed Sowers, we alldonated to buy the metal for the roof. Well our first contact was to phoneNatalia who is a school teacher and was our contact when we first went. Shespeaks good English and was a young widow then but married again 4 years agoand now has 2 lovely little girls. Her husband was busy today working ontheir lovely house, having raised the roof and built another story on it. She took us to find the poorest and most needy families and gathered anumber of them at different locations. Once they had gathered I gave thefirst group a short message in the gospel and Howard the second group. Theconditions some of these people live in is terrible and doesn't seem toimprove at all. Some seem to have lots of children and are always havingmore. We wonder where they sleep them all in some 2 room homes. Once we have spoken a word, we take out the boxes of clothing and they sortout what they want with help from Flo, then we dole out the food itemsaccording to the size of the family. They are all very grateful as there isvery little opportunity to make a reasonable living in these hills. Thefloods did not affect them too much in this area but they had 3 weeks ofheavy rain that flooded all the gardens. Some bridges were washed out. We finished up at the home of Natalia's sister Ira, with the 14 children,all at home plus one married and living at home. She fed us a lunch whilethe people were rounded up from the homes up on the hills. We left theremaining clothes with Ira who doles them out as she hears of need. She isalso a teacher and is very much in touch with the local needs. And so home after a tiring but profitable day; I was hit with utterexhaustion by the time I got home but feel fine now. Good night to all.